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HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

#111

Post by InclinedPlane »

badgar wrote: post #57
saraid216 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, here you are, on a site run off a flat file database.

A commenting site that: - Has average latency over 500ms when not under load - Performs quite poorly under load (I hate to bring it up, but the most recent example was Aaron Swartz's passing. Anyone who used HN then to get news knows how poorly HN performs under load) - Is restarted every week or two because it leaks memory - Keeps XSRF tokens in memory and loses them across restarts - Doesn't have a full markup lang…

A worthwhile criticism, except...

How many ads do you see on HN? What's the ad revenue? What are the operating costs?

Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

#112

Post by jakub_g »

dylangs1030 wrote: post #46
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #18

This is just idle speculation but are there any stats on HN traffic? I have always wondered just how many folks read it, how often etc? I heard a million accounts being bandied around at one point and I cannot tell if that is excessive or not?

It was said up in the comments. 120k unique IPs per day. 1.3 million page views. source: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

Newest data straight from pg in this thread: 200k / 2M.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5230201

Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

#113

Post by gbog »

ericHosick wrote: post #32
pg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://imgur.com/VuSH2j5

I call foul. This doesn't even look like it's powered up. Edit: Wow. 3.5 years on HN and my first down-voted post. I guess I should have added a sarcasm tag or stick with keeping comments "safe".

> 3.5 years on HN and my first down-voted post

Honest? Then, if I were you, I'd try to be a bit less consensual from time to time. I got plenty of downvotes. I would hope even pg get his share, that would show sane critical thinking.

Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

#115

Post by self »

nostrademons wrote: post #90
shiftpgdn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people underestimate how powerful a single well configured server can be. You don't need Heroku/AWS for everything.

Also, people underestimate the power of serving out of RAM. It's not unreasonable to serve 20-30K QPS off a single server if the work it needs to do is limited to minimal request parsing and fetching some data from main memory. That's about 2.5 billion requests/day, fully loaded. Granted, I'm thinking something more like memcached than a fully-formed webserver, but an in-memory webserver that stores its data in hasht…

I use redis for this exact reason -- I prerender over 2,000 page templates twice a day, and store them in RAM. The app server has to do a little processing before sending the pages to users -- it picks a different template depending on whether the user's logged in or not, and then substitutes the user's info into the template (for logout/profile links). The session info is also stored in redis. This lets me reboot the server and be ready to serve pages again almost as soon as it's back up. With all the data, redis uses about 300-400MB RAM on a 64bit Debian VM.

I use a VPS for my site, and on a VPS, the only thing you're allocated that you can depend on always being available is RAM. The processor cores might be shared with a busy user, and you can't always depend on high disk I/O speeds.

Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

#117

Post by badgar »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #111
badgar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A commenting site that: - Has average latency over 500ms when not under load - Performs quite poorly under load (I hate to bring it up, but the most recent example was Aaron Swartz's passing. Anyone who used HN then to get news knows how poorly HN performs under load) - Is restarted every week or two because it leaks memory - Keeps XSRF tokens in memory and loses them across restarts - Doesn't have a full markup lang…

A worthwhile criticism, except... How many ads do you see on HN? What's the ad revenue? What are the operating costs?

So, to reiterate your argument:

1. We don't matter to pg because we don't generate profit and are instead a slow drain on resources

2. Therefore this site must be a relic of the 90s written in an ad-hoc collection of mzscheme macros

Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

#118

Post by technotony »

robbiep wrote: post #39

Do you think you could go down for a week? That's generally how long I need to break an addiction

I recommend using StayFocusd: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...

It lets you limit the number of minutes you can read sites (and importantly links from thoses sites). I give myself 10 minutes per day until 9pm at night.

Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

#119

Post by e-dard »

ghshephard wrote: post #78
robbiep wrote: post #39

Do you think you could go down for a week? That's generally how long I need to break an addiction

Add me to the list - I'm in for $100 if we can make it a one week outage. $250 if we can stretch it out to two weeks. I'm sorry, but 10 minutes on a saturday morning does nothing for me.

Without meaning to sound snarky or anything, isn’t there something else at work if you have to externally block sites to stop you procrastinating?

I would have thought getting to the root cause of your “HN addiction” would probably be a better alternative.

Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

#120

Post by robbiep »

technotony wrote: post #118
robbiep wrote: post #39

Do you think you could go down for a week? That's generally how long I need to break an addiction

I recommend using StayFocusd: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej... It lets you limit the number of minutes you can read sites (and importantly links from thoses sites). I give myself 10 minutes per day until 9pm at night.

I actually use stayfocused, but always have my phone and tablet which don't work with plugins!
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